1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a playback apparatus for playing back audio information and the like using a recording medium such as a PC card and the like, and more particularly to a playback apparatus for executing a communication between an external PC and a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, as digital technologies become more advanced, general purpose machines such as PC (Personal Computer) and PDA (Personal Digital Assistants) and dedicated machines such as, MD (MiniDisk), CD-R players, and HDD (Hard Disk Driver) are coming into widespread.
Under the circumstances, playback apparatuses, which store audio information and the like in a memory and the like of the main body thereof as a digital file and which can easily play back the digital file, have been developed and have reached a stage of proliferation (for example, Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2000-333285). In these playback apparatuses, it is possible to record a digital file from a PC on the memory and the like of the main body through a communication cable and to play back the digital file. In this case, however, a PC card type HDD is not used as an external memory device, and an interface is not switched to increase a transmission speed.
It is also contemplated here to use, for example, the PC card type HDD as the recording medium, to connect the PC to the recording medium through a cable and, to record the audio information and the like from the playback apparatus to the recording medium through the cable while mounting the PC card type HDD as the recording medium on the playback apparatus. In this case, the audio information and the like can be easily recorded because it is not necessary to dismount the recording medium from the PC and to mount it on the playback apparatus again.
However, when the audio file and the like are transmitted from the PC to the playback apparatus through a USB (Universal Serial Bus) cable, the audio file and the like received through the USB cable are transmitted to the recording medium connected to the playback apparatus at a very slow transmission speed of, for example, 0.5 M byte/sec. because they are transmitted through a PCMCIA interface under the control of the controller of the playback apparatus. Accordingly, even if the audio file and the like are transmitted from the PC to the playback apparatus at a transmission speed of, for example, 8 M bytes/sec through a USB 2.0 cable having a transmission speed as fast as that of the IEEE1394 communication standard, there is a problem that the recording speed of them on the PC card type HDD mounted on the playback apparatus is very slow because the transmission speed of the PCMCIA communication standard in the playback apparatus is very slow.
That is, in the conventional playback apparatus, when an audio file and the like are recorded from an external PC and the like on a recording medium mounted on the playback apparatus, a problem arises in that even if the transmission speed between the external PC and the playback apparatus is fast, a sufficient transmission speed cannot be obtained because the PCMCIA communication standard is employed between the playback apparatus and the recording medium, and thus a recording speed is made slow.